President Trump said on Friday that Elon Musk would soon turn his cost-cutting attention to the Pentagon, a vast bureaucracy that has billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk through SpaceX and other companies he owns.
“He will be looking at education pretty quickly, and he will be looking at military,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a news conference at the White House with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan. “At military, too.”
The president expressed no concern about the conflict of interest. The Defense Department relies on Mr. Musk to get most of its satellites into orbit. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.
Mr. Trump praised the group of people who work for Mr. Musk as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been orchestrating firings of government employees, including almost 10,000 at the United States Agency for International Development, which coordinates foreign aid and assistance.
“I’m very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing,” the president said. “They’re doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”
Mr. Trump addressed questions about Mr. Musk as he welcomed Mr. Ishiba for a day of meetings, hailing what he called a “vital economic relationship between our two countries.”
With Mr. Ishiba standing next to him in the East Room, the president announced that Japan would be investing in U.S. Steel after former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. blocked the $14 billion sale of the company. Mr. Trump had also said he opposed the sale.
Mr. Biden’s decision to block the sale had been seen as a serious blow to Japan. Mr. Trump did not provide details but said the deal had been “restructured” so that Japan would be an investor rather than an owner.
Among the other issues that the two leaders discussed at the White House on Friday was trade. Mr. Trump expressed displeasure with what he said was a $100 billion trade deficit with Japan, but said he thought the two countries could resolve that imbalance quickly.
He did not announce tariffs on Japan, but said he would be making a broader announcement next week about the need for “reciprocal trade” with all countries, an indication that he is considering far-reaching tariffs on any country that imposes them on the U.S. economy.
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